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Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Building a Dog Gate on the Stairs

Due to winter and no tourists around at this time of year, it has been slow at my shop. Of course I keep busy trying out things and creating new products to sell this year. I have worked on a few things at home because my house has been ignored since I bought the old house that I have converted into my workshop.

We have two small Chihuahuas that can get up the stairs to our second floor, but can't (or won't?) get back down. So... if we don't put something across the staircase, they often will go up and then we have to go up and fetch them! I had a piece of plastic lattice, that was left here in the shed by the past owner, and I propped it up on the staircase. It worked sometimes, but often fell over or one of us tripped on it! So finally I decided to make a proper dog gate.

I used some leftover poplar and the scrap piece of lattice.

I used my tablesaw to cut a groove in the poplar pieces to fit the lattice.

This groove doesn't look so good on the end and I could have left it this way.

Because I had left the poplar pieces longer than I needed them to be (always a good idea) I thought I should make a tongue on each end of the vertical pieces that would fit into the groove of the horizontal gate pieces. This makes it stronger and it also looks much nicer, see...

So the gate was all cut to size, to fit the staircase opening, and glued together.

I painted it white and added hinges to one side and a small latch to the other. Because of the wide baseboards, I had to add a small piece of wood (seen below on the right) to allow the top hinge to be attached in line with the lower one which is on the baseboard.

I really need to paint all of the wood around and on the staircase. It is currently beige but I want it all to be white. I'd also like to take out the carpeting and change the wallpaper, but that will have to wait for another time.

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After many years of being a stay-at-home mother I came to the realization that I needed to take back control of my life and to "follow my heart" to a new life. Always being involved in arts and crafts, doing everything from painting to sewing, knitting and deck building, I took the Carpentry Course at the local college and graduated as a Cabinetmaker. Since that time I have spent many hours reading all I could about woodworking from magazines, books and the internet and practicing my trade by trying out different techniques and tools.
I enjoy creating things, so that at the end of the day I can see what I've done. I hope to be able to inspire some people, especially women, to make things out of wood from scratch using real power tools!
P. S. Please check out my website to see the furniture I make.